The Coming Storm

Forced Entertainment tangle and cross-cut multiple stories to make a compelling and unstable performance. From love and death to sex and laundry, from shipwrecks to falling snow, personal anecdotes rub shoulders with imaginary movies, and half-remembered novels bump into distorted fairytales.

Using a method as inventive as it is absurd, six performers create, collaborate, ambush and disrupt this epic saga that is resolutely too big for the stage. The result is comical, contradictory and poignant; full of wrong-headed tricks, broken dances, sleazy drum interruptions and perfunctory piano accompaniment. Everything builds and everything shimmers. Everything teeters and everything trembles. Everything is reshaped and everything is cannibalised. The Coming Storm is Forced Entertainment at its best – trademark black humour, a collage of arresting images and an anarchic performance style.

Director Tim Etchells, and the regular group of Forced Entertainment performers – Robin Arthur, Cathy Naden, Richard Lowdon, Claire Marshall and Terry O’Connor – were joined for the project by Phil Hayes who previously worked with the company on The Thrill of It All.

The project also featured live music for the first time in the group’s work as well as continuing collaborations with the lighting designer Nigel Edwards and the sound designer and composer John Avery.